


Socks

by flippyspoon



Series: Pour Some Sugar on Me [39]
Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: Fluff, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-06
Updated: 2018-12-06
Packaged: 2019-09-13 01:32:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 872
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16883070
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/flippyspoon/pseuds/flippyspoon





	Socks

Steve wakes up to the sound of Billy grumbling.

“Where are all your clean socks?” Billy says over his shoulder.

“I dunno.” Steve wraps his naked body in his comforter and crawls over to flop down near Billy who’s sitting on the foot of the bed as he rifles through Steve’s dresser. “What’re you doing?”

“My feet are cold,” Billy says.

“You’re cold, baby?” Steve murmurs, leaning on his elbows and leaning over to kiss Billy’s shoulder. “I’ll warm you up.”

“My  _feet_  are cold. Are you gonna fuck my feet?”

“I dunno. I’m pretty creative.”

Billy snorts at and then blurts a laugh. “ _What_  the hell, Steve?” Billy yanks a giant clump of carefully paired socks out of the back of a drawer. There are about twenty pairs of prints socks mostly in orange and green and black. Billy tosses them on the bed. He’s laughing. He looks absolutely delighted as he sorts through the very childish socks all printed with skulls, Frankenstein monsters, jack-o-lanterns, and ghosts.

“My Aunt Marcie,” Steve says, flopping over on his back, the comforter falling open. He stares up at Billy’s upside down face. “She sends them to me. Every year. I never wear them. Unless it’s an emergency.”

“Why don’t ya just give em’ away?” Billy says. Idly, he stretches a sock over his hand and traces it down the middle of Steve’s chest.

“I dunno,” Steve says, shrugging. He reaches up to squeeze Billy’s socked hand, kisses the inside of his wrist. “She’s sweet about it. She thinks I like em’. I don’t like to throw stuff like that away.” He bites his lip, smiling up at Billy. “I have everything you ever gave me.”  
“Everything?” Billy says skeptically. He tweaks Steve nipple with his sock hand and smiles when Steve hums a little, arching his back just a bit.

“I mean…” Steve shrugs. “Not like soda cans if you handed me a Coke, but every note you ever wrote me I have. And you’re always handing me weird little things like bottle caps. I don’t know why you do that.”

Billy blushes at that. When they were friendly but not romantic he’d give Steve the weirdest little items in some weird attempt to say “I love you” via found objects. He still does it out of habit; a nice rock he found, a cool book of matches. They all say, “I love you, Steve, I love you.”

“I’ll show you my favorite!” Steve pushes Billy back, rolling off the bed. Billy tilts his head appreciating the view of Steve’s ass as he goes to a box on his dresser and pulls a smaller cigar box out of it. Steve sits on the bed and opens it. Billy peaks in to see a messy pile of notes, a bunch of ticket stubs from The Hawk from all the flicks they’ve seen together, an empty Marlboro pack, a bunch of bottle caps, gumballs, baseball cards, the rocks and matchbooks…

Steve’s tongue rests on his bottom lip and he pokes through the precious trash until he finds…

“Here it is,” he murmurs. It’s a candy heart. Billy’s cheeks burn. It’s a white candy heart and written on it in red is: “ME & YOU.”

Billy remembers giving it to Steve on Valentine’s Day when Steve still never spoke to him unless forced to by circumstance. Billy had been attempting to warm up to him after the fight. He had not been very good at it. He kept sounding like a dick even when he was trying to be friendly. On Valentine’s Day he’d been pining particularly painfully and he’d walked right up to Steve at lunch and left the candy heart on the table next to Steve’s tray.

“Happy Valentine’s, pretty boy.” To Billy’s mind it had been quite the gesture. He’d put thought into it though. He’d waited until Steve was a lone and correctly deduced that Steve wouldn’t tell anyone even if he thought it was weird.

Apparently it had worked. Steve had started talking to him after that.

“It was something about the way you said ‘pretty boy,’” Steve says now, smiling up at him, the heart between his fingers. “It didn’t sound like an insult. Not that time. Sounded like…”

Billy leans forward and kisses him on the cheek and under his ear and whispers like the lover he is, “Pretty boy.”

“Yeah,” Steve says. He drops the heart in the box and pushes it aside, wrapping his arms around Billy. “So I keep it. I like to remember it.”

All Billy says is, “Hmm.”

“Because I loooove you,” Steve sings in his ear. He leans back and watches the slow smile that grows on Billy’s face. An “I love you” never just goes by Billy. He always seems to soak it in.

“Guess I love you too,” Billy mumbles.

“Enough to wear these socks?” Steve says, holding up a particularly goofy pair of white socks printed with grinning jack-o-lanterns.

“No,” Billy says. “No, I don’t.”

“Yes, you do!” Steve tackles him to the bed laughing and then they’re wrestling and giggling, naked in the sheets until it inevitably turns to kissing and writhing and gasping atop the heap of awful Halloween socks.


End file.
